Some of the questions that will be answered are: What is Lean Six Sigma? What does the term "Sigma" refer to? What is the history of Six Sigma? Where are most companies operating today in terms of sigma performance? Is "operational excellence" the primary focus for Lean Six Sigma? What are the roles of Champions, Master Black Belts, Black Belts, and Green Belts? What steps are there in a typical Lean Six Sigma deployment approach?

What is Lean Six Sigma?

Lean Six Sigma combines two extraordinary improvement methodologies: producing work faster (using Lean principles), and producing work better (using Six Sigma). Lean Six Sigma is a proven business strategy for driving out waste and inefficiency and increasing customer loyalty - by orders of magnitude. In less than two decades Lean Six Sigma has become the gold standard for creating world-class organizations.

Six Sigma is the pinnacle of quality performance - the virtual elimination of errors, mistakes and defects from every product, process, and/or transaction in an enterprise. Six Sigma is a management process and business metric. It is an overall strategy to improve growth and productivity, and a measurement of quality performance.

As a strategy, Six Sigma is a way to achieve performance breakthroughs - top and bottom-line results. As a business metric, Sigma is a statistical unit of measure that reflects process capability. A six sigma company operates at only 3.4 defects or errors per million opportunities - or 99.9997% error-free. Six Sigma is the gold standard because it is widely understood in the business world as a quest for "process perfection."

What does the term "Sigma" refer to?

Taken from the Greek alphabet, the term "sigma" is used in statistics as a measure of variation. The sigma scale correlates to such characteristics as defects per unit, parts per million defective, and the probability of failure/error.

You can easily determine the sigma level for a process if you know the process yield or the "defects per million opportunities" (DPMO). In manufacturing, for example, sigma could be used to measure the number of sub-standard products, or late shipments. In a service organization, it could quantify call center performance (wait times), or errors in billing.  

An organization's sigma level indicates the performance of a process against some set specification. So, the sigma level (one, two, three, and so on) represents how well a process is performing. In the past, customers were happy with a 99.5 percent quality level. That is no longer acceptable today.  Winning and keeping customers requires near perfect performance.

CMC offers a free consultation for those interested in learning more about Lean Six Sigma and how it can benefit your organization.